My New Girlfriend is Different

by Charles C. Cole

I was sleeping a lot, adjusting to being “unattached” again. One late morning, my roommate, Edgar, came back from the gym to find me passed out on the couch in my boxers and a Journey T-shirt.

“Drunk as a skunk in a bunk with a funk,” he whispered in my ear, then he flicked his finger at me. “Wakey-wakey,” he said. He’d been living in the States for fifteen years but still held tight to some charming UK expressions. “Wassup, chum? Bird troubles?”

“Don’t ask.”

“Give.”

“My lady friend of the last month, Lila, broke up with me by text message. Something about a ‘prior interdimensional commitment.’ Screw that. Reading between the lines, I think she wants someone more ambitious. I’m the kind of guy who gets high hugging trees and stepping barefoot in mud, a vegetarian musician with a blue-feather earring. I like nature, not people, present company excluded.

“I also like shaving. She told me more times than I could count that she fantasized about ‘biker bears,’ big dudes with beards who could pick her up and hold her there during intimacy. Not me.”

“How’d you find her?”

“A comedy club. We heckled together, got drunk together, were thrown out together, and had sex in the backseat of my car. It was weird, man. She wanted to, then she didn’t want to.”

* * *

She had to be at least thirty; I mean, there’s no way I was her first role in the hay.

She said, “You don’t understand: I’m a Plebeian; we mate for life.”

I said, “I know that word. Is that a cult?” I don’t know why, but at that moment I thought she was being charmingly self-deprecating.

She said, “Forget it.” Then she took her index fingers to my temples like she was literally going to wipe my mind of our conversation.

I brushed them away, saying, “No you don’t, chick. I like you. We’re having fun. If you think you’re gonna somehow make me forget you, well, you can forget it.”

She smiled. Then she covered her mouth with both hands and whispered, “I’ve never done this before.”

Thoughts ran through my mind: Casually? While drunk? In a car? I said, “Lila, some of us are born with money and some with looks and some with a winning personality, but rarely all three. The one guaranteed thing we all have in this world is free will. If you want to stop, that’s cool. This has been crazy fun. No harm, no foul. But if you want to keep going and you’re holding back because of how your parents raised you, honey, you’re a big girl now and you get to make your own decisions.”

Then she made her mind up like turning a switch. She went for it. We went crazy. How we got away with rocking the car like that in that neighborhood at that hour, I have no idea.

Hours later, as we lay collapsed in our sweat, my head was on fire. I swear she’d talked non-stop, but non-verbally, about her family, about her disappointments, about trying to belong, about everything about the human race she found quirky, exhausting, endearing; about her mission. And that’s how we started.

* * *

Edgar stripped out of his sweaty shirt into a fresh one he had on the back of a nearby chair. God, he was built like an Olympian gymnast. He poured himself a mug of coffee from a pot I’d started earlier, when trying to wake up.

“You had fun,” he said. “That’s what’s important. And now you’re going through withdrawal. I get it.”

“When she came by, I should have introduced her, I know. But I just wanted her to myself. For a while, we really enjoyed each other. It was intense. She’s gorgeous and smart and Nordic with long bright blonde hair and she has big eyes you can see your reflection in, and she smells like Nilla Wafers, I kid you not. Making love to her was out of this world.”

“I don’t think she’s a Plebeian,” he said. “You probably misheard her. Unless she’s from the lower class of Rome.”

“That’s what that is! She said it, she did.”

“Dude, don’t freak, but I think she said ‘Pleiadian.’ That makes more sense.”

“I guess. Maybe,” I allowed. “Could have been. Is it a cult? Could she be in trouble?”

Edgar stepped to our big living room window, where I had the blinds closed to support my napping, and he peeked out. “Yep, still there,” he said.

“Police car?” I asked, with a slight panic.

“Two men in black, just standing on the corner, looking up this way. I passed them on the way to the gym. For a moment, I thought they were after me for overstaying my Visa, but that’s not it. They’re waiting for your ‘girlfriend’ to come back maybe. Or maybe they want to talk to you about her when you finally leave our apartment.”

“People from her cult?” I asked, wanting to look but not wanting to look.

“You’re not listening, Mr. Lonelyhearts. She’s not in a cult. She’s an alien.”

“Illegal alien?” I asked.

“Extraterrestrial,” he explained, pausing for every syllable. “Go online sometime. Google it.”

“No way,” I said. “She’s as human as you and me, but paler and smoother and with bigger eyes. And, sometimes, she can talk with her mind to my mind, without speaking.”

“Telepathically?” he asked.

“I just thought, maybe, we were in synch, aligned emotionally, and it seemed like telepathy.”

You have to understand that Edgar had a poster of a flying saucer on his bedroom wall. He truly believed in that stuff.

“She’ll be back,” he assured me.

“Really?”

“Better get used to having a chaperone, because Big Brother is watching now.”

“I miss her so much,” I said, wondering how long it takes for a roundtrip to the Pleiades.

Moral: when a woman says no, don’t push unless you’re ready for consequences.